Customer Partnering is a way to acquire new customers and defend existing customers from the predation of competitors. You can use it to deliver more value, while protecting and improving your margins. It’s also a way to rechannel the negotiating process into a joint planning process. Why negotiate when instead you can plan together? Develop a joint plan. By improving coordination and communication between companies, you can improve quality, cycle time, efficiency, and costs. When you do this right, you modify your organization and operations to better match the needs of your customer, and your customer modifies their organization and operations to better match the capabilities and needs of yours. Both vendor and customer gain mutual competitive advantage by (a) increasing the net value delivered by both parties to the customer’s customer, and/or (b) increase the cumulative cost effectiveness of the coupled business systems. Here is the recipe 1, develop a business plan with the customer that generates new value, 2, make a place in that plan for your company, and 3, make sure you capture your fair share of that value.