When do you need a partner rather than a supplier?

Most requests to an external company arrive with the answer already attached. A business needs a new website, or SEO, or a CRM, or someone to sort out social media, and it asks for exactly that. Quite often the diagnosis is right and the sensible thing is to get on with it. Now and then the request is only the visible part of something else, such as a website that's struggling because nobody has settled how the business should be positioned, or a marketing problem that's partly a sales process problem. What decides how a relationship should work has less to do with how much work gets bought than with how much of the problem the business is asking somebody else to own.

That's a different question from whether to use an agency, a consultant or a freelancer, and it's worth settling first, because the relationships involved are quite different and none of them is better than the others.

When you already know what you need

Some businesses have made the important decisions already. They know the website needs a particular set of pages, or that a video needs producing, a campaign delivering, some photography doing or a piece of development building, and what they want is somebody capable who'll do it properly. That's a supplier relationship, and a good supplier is exactly the right answer. They don't need detailed knowledge of how the business makes money or what the leadership team wants to change, because the brief already contains the decisions that matter. Bringing in a photographer for a day doesn't call for a six-month strategic relationship, and wrapping one around it would only add cost, meetings and complexity.

When you need the thinking more than the doing

The opposite situation is more common than it sounds. Plenty of businesses have capable people inside who can execute well, and what's missing is an outside view. That might be research, someone to challenge an assumption, experience of how similar situations played out elsewhere, help deciding what comes first or an honest read on what is and isn't working. We've recently been talking to a business where the arrangement under discussion is largely a regular working session with the leadership team. We'd act as a sounding board, look at what has worked so far, question the next decisions and help with messaging, targets and direction, and most of the execution would stay in-house.

That sits oddly with the usual idea of a partnership, which tends to mean the external company taking on more. Here the relationship involves very little delivery, and the best outcome is a client who ends up better at doing the work themselves. A partner who leaves a team more capable than they found it has done something useful, even if it means less work for them.

When you need both

Other businesses need the direction and the hands. They may not have the people, the time or the specialist skills to carry out everything that has to happen, and the work might span a website, a customer platform, internal systems, content, photography and video, search visibility or analytics, with each piece affecting the others. In that situation it helps if the people shaping the direction also take responsibility for making a good deal of it happen, since the decisions and their consequences stay in the same place.

None of this depends on how many services get bought. A business can spend heavily on delivery and still have a straightforward supplier relationship, while another buys almost no execution and has a very close strategic one. What separates them is context, access and responsibility, meaning how much the external team understands about the business, how involved they are in decisions and how much of the thinking they're accountable for.

Working from the brief, and sometimes challenging it

A supplier can usually work well from a contained brief. A partner needs more than that, because strategic input depends on understanding how the business makes money, who its best customers actually are, where enquiries come from and what happens once one arrives, which systems are already in use, what has been tried before and what the leadership team is trying to change. Nobody can make good strategic decisions while only being shown one isolated piece of the business. Access like that has to be earned, and the more context a client hands over the more responsibility the partner has to use it properly. That includes saying the request is sensible when it is, and saying when something slightly different is needed, when the business doesn't need to spend money on this yet or when the internal team should test something first. Recommending less work, or different work, is a large part of what makes a relationship a partnership.

It doesn't follow that every brief is wrong, or that an outside team knows the business better than the people running it. The client usually knows the business far better. What an outside team can add is a view from having seen similar problems elsewhere, which only helps if it has enough context to know whether the problem in front of it is one of them.

What's already inside the business

The right arrangement depends heavily on what the business can already do. A company with a capable marketing team may get far more from strategic challenge and specialist input than from handing over its whole operation. Another may have strong leadership and a clear commercial direction but no developers, content producers or search specialists. A third may simply have one well-defined project that needs completing well. A partner shouldn't build dependency to keep an engagement large, and where the client can and should own something internally, helping them do it well is part of the value.

Continuity matters in some cases and not in others. Pieces of digital work tend to affect each other. A website project might show up a problem in how enquiries are handled, search research might reveal that the company's positioning doesn't match how customers describe their problem, and content work might show that the business has barely documented its own expertise. A team that already understands the wider context can respond to those discoveries far more intelligently than a series of suppliers who each see one task. That doesn't mean every business needs a permanent retainer, and bringing in different specialists for different jobs is sometimes exactly right. It comes down to whether understanding built up over time improves the decisions being made.

We work in all three ways at EDP, as a specialist supplier for a defined piece of work, as an advisory partner who brings research and challenge, and as a broader partner who does both. Which one we'd suggest depends mostly on what's already in the building, and it's worth a business deciding whether it needs somebody to do the work, help it decide what work should be done, or both before it decides who to ask.