John Guido | October 7, 2021

The Guide to Utilizing a Partner to Partner IT EcosystemCompanies have recognized the way technology has evolved and that sharing services and skills is the future for the industry. Specializing in a certain niche and developing a SaaS or other services for example that fill a specific need opens up many possibilities.

There are examples of this all over. Your company offers a CRM solution, but your customers are increasingly looking for an analytics integration to monitor the interactions from your CRM. You don’t provide this as a service, so what do you do? You partner with others and provide their solution through your own service. When you are a part of a partner to partner (P2P) IT ecosystem that provides access to critical skills, this makes things simple. You are now able to provide added value to your customers and fulfill their needs.

A P2P ecosystem is where you partner with another provider that offers a service which complements your own. This provides mutual benefits for both parties without the need of an intermediary. You have a direct connection to each other. You help them reach more customers and a wider audience, but you also increase your own reach and customer retention by providing a full service.

Whether it is the need to fill a skill gap such as a specific vendor or brand solution, or Microservices, AI, CRM, ERP, LaaS, SaaS, IoT, consulting and many more – they can all be accessible via a partner to partner IT ecosystem. Whatever complements your specialized service can now be combined into your projects to create the total solution that satisfies your customers’ requirements.

How P2P Ecosystem Platforms Work

No one company can be an expert at all skill sets in their industry. P2P ecosystems connect pre-vetted, expert companies to help fill each other’s skill gaps or project needs to save you the leg work of having to research partners from scratch. 

“Everyone knows they need to look at industries adjacent to them, build a partner ecosystem non-competitively, and strike alliances,” says Forrester’s Ecosystems, Channels, Partnerships, & Alliances Principal Analyst, Jay McBain.

At P2P Global, our platform connects top technology solution providers together. We don’t interfere or act as an intermediary between partners – we help facilitate P2P engagements with an effective platform approach. We curate candidates that best fit project opportunities using our proprietary AI technology by matching their skills to an opportunity creators’ project criteria, skills or certifications needed, and priorities.

How do I Get Started?

Once you sign up as a member, our industry leading platform assists you throughout the whole process. Regardless if you are interested in creating or responding to opportunities, all of our members start by creating a descriptive company profile through the company dashboard. This showcases your unique skills, expertise, certifications, vendor relationships and even awards and testimonials.

Once you have your profile setup, you can create opportunities and/or respond to those opportunities based on being matched to specific skill gaps identified by others. Creating and responding is a simple process that is menu driven and allows for the inclusion of attachments, such as a detailed SOW or project outline. 

As the opportunity creator, you tell us the project, scope, skills required and any qualifying screening questions you feel are necessary. You can also include your “favorited” candidates from previous projects, and they will then be selected if they respond. As the opportunity responder, you can ask clarifying questions, respond to screening questions, and even attach a proposal that addresses the needs of the project.

We handle the rest, leaving you time to focus on other aspects. P2P will curate the top opportunity responding candidates based on best fit. They submit proposals, confirm capabilities and we provide the opportunity creator with a ranked set of qualified candidates. No need to spend resources headhunting or sifting through applications – we do everything and present it in an easy to digest format. Throughout the process, email alerts are sent to all parties to help guide the P2P engagement from start to finish. 

How Are Partners Connected?

From your specially curated list of responders, the opportunity creator can easily select candidates to engage with and review their company profiles, responses, proposals, and screening question answers. Once the opportunity creator selects a responder(s), both parties enter into a partnering agreement and contact information is then exchanged. Then they can contact each other directly through our platform and schedule an interview to see if the fit is correct and outline any further requirements.

Hire and get started! Everything is done through our dedicated platform and all the leg work is done by us at P2P Global. Once your project is completed, you have the option to “favorite” each other and leave a review by endorsing each others’ skills. Favoriting partners allows for even faster procurement of the skills you need all in one place.

“As a digital marketing agency, we don’t frequently partner with IT companies to deliver on projects for our clients. However, when we recently had a client need come up that involved us having to source a reputable and knowledgeable data analytics company, we turned to the P2P Global platform to help us on our search. We immediately were matched with highly rated companies and were quickly able to connect with them to further discuss the project needs and evaluate for best fit. We had no idea where to start our search, so using P2P Global made everything convenient, fast, and easy, and made us confident that we could find a great partner to bring to our client,” said Drew Himel, Founder & CEO, Consult PCR.

The Benefits of P2P

As mentioned in Jay McBain’s 2021 Channel Software Tech Stack blog, ecosystems don’t run on spreadsheets.1 The future is now – with automation, flexibility, scalability, and self-service – our platform empowers you to build up your ecosystem of on-demand expertise. This saves you an abundance of time, even when starting a new project you will be presented with a tiered list of curated candidates. Expertise discovery has never been easier, build trust and confidence and scale your projects effectively.

Summary

Networking is a big key to success in business, and using a P2P platform keeps everything localized. You can search, request, connect, chat, schedule, propose, hire and review all in this one place. Streamlining any onboarding and temporary contract acquisition, and all of this is done while P2P Globals platform does all the leg work for you.

Find anything you need to grow your business. Cloud service providers, security specialists, consultants all with their own professional profiles of unique and specialized skills. Contact us and join the P2P Global IT ecosystem to push your projects to the next level!

1 https://www.forrester.com/blogs/channel-software-tech-stack-2021/

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