Building a scalable model for partner-fueled customer offerings
NORDIC ENERGY SUPPLIER
A Nordic energy supplier wanted to accelerate its shift from being a pure electricity supplier to becoming a trusted energy partner. To get there, the client needed a structured way to source, evaluate, and run partnerships that would strengthen their customer proposition.
Customer expectations in the energy market are changing – the turbulent market makes consumers more engaged, customers expect new and digital solutions, and increasingly want help lowering their consumption and reducing their carbon footprint. This created a need to leverage partnerships to strengthen the customer offering with supplementary products and services across the customer ecosystem.
At the same time, the absence of a partnership strategy had created recurring pain points: limited coordination across teams, ad‑hoc execution, unclear ownership, and gaps in supporting infrastructure such as technology/CRM, making partnerships difficult to implement and maintain effectively.
Together with the client, Differ developed a complete partnership framework covering partner strategy, sourcing and evaluation guidelines, and a practical way‑of‑working. The strategy set a clear ambition: to increase business impact, perceived customer value, and sustainability by building the right portfolio of partners that could enhance the customer offering.
To operationalize, we designed a partner portfolio structured across four ecosystem layers, ranging from enhancing the core product itself to partnerships that strengthen overall brand values. The portfolio was designed to ensure that partnerships resulted in tangible customer offerings such as bundled add ons, targeted benefits, and lifecycle relevant services that increase the value of the core product. Additionally, Differ helped clarify partnership types to match business intent: long‑term ecosystem partnerships versus short/medium‑term campaign collaborations.
As a result, the client established a shared and actionable partnership operating model. Evaluation and decision criteria were standardized, clear ownership was appointed across the partnership lifecycle and an implementation roadmap to close capability gaps was developed. Altogether, this positioned the organization to build and manage partnerships more consistently and at scale.
Alongside the development of the partnership framework and operating model, Differ took on the operational task to start using the model in practice, leading partner dialogues and testing the evaluation framework. This resulted in a first partnership being processed through the framework and integrated into the customer offering already before the project was closed.
