How can your small business be effective in the marketplace by working with a large company? In this latest IBM Infomentary Mark Register, IBM Vice President of Software Business Partners, explains what your company can do to grow.

He says that small businesses have a great opportunity to grow with large businesses because they have some important things going for them: small businesses are nimble and are able to take their value proposition to a customer around a specific area of expertise. But in order to do this successfully, he says small businesses need to identify three things: where they want to be in the market, what their value proposition is, and how they can help their large business partner.

Register draws much of this insight from his personal experience starting in a very small business consisting of ten people. He says that one of the first things they did was identify which large company in their market was a good fit, and then figured out how to merge their own value proposition with that of the large business to add value to their customers. The large company was interested enough to draw them into a number of their accounts, creating important growth for Register’s small business–it grew to four times its original size in just a couple of years.

To sum it up, Register remarks that there are great opportunities for small businesses who partner with large companies “if you can capture the essence of what the partnership’s all about, which at the end of the day is adding value to your joint customers.”