Five Rules! (or Badda Bing Badda Boom Part II)

The picture above was me (metaphorically) after sitting through a conference call with a company who wanted to talk about partnering with my company. As you can see from the picture, it was not a great experience. It still amazes me how many alliance people schedule exploratory partnership conversations, but then don't take the time to prepare for those discussions!

To prevent this from happening to others, I bring you the Five Rules for Having an Exploratory Partnership Conversation!

Rule #1. Tell me what you want!

If you approach me, the onus is on YOU, to explain what you want - where you see the value in a potential partnership. Don't leave it to me to "intuit" your proposal, or guess what you want us to do together.

Rule #2. It's all about me.

I'm already working on more than I can say grace over. You want me to attend to you and this potential partnership. This means I've got to figure out what I'm not going to do so that I can do this. Which means you need to sell me on why I should care. What's in it for me?  I don't care what your alliance and product strategy is - unless it's directly relevant to what you are proposing and its value to me. Set your radio to my favorite radio station - WIIFM (What's in it for me?) and make your message compelling.

Rule #3. Know what my company does.

This might seem obvious, but as my grandmother was fond of saying "common sense ain't so common". I've gotten calls from companies who had not even bothered to look at my company's website to understand our solutions and key industry segments. It will be difficult for you to craft a compelling value proposition, much less a partnering proposition, if you don't know what I do.


Rule #4. Have a clear call to action or next step.

Loosey goosey close is simply inviting me put this at the bottom of the pile. If you get my attention, have a clear next step identified. Who do we need to engage next? What do we need to cover? How do we complete the due diligence process to get to EOJ?

Rule #5. PREPARE before you get on the phone with me!

Rules 1 through 4 pretty much indicate that you've got to do your homework. Do not throw your standard 25 slide company presentation at me and expect me to "figure it out"! Think through your pitch, develop a compelling story and "serve it up to me on a biscuit!" - meaning, clearly articulate what you want and why I should care.


Follow these rules and the odds of you having a productive dialog with your partner prospect will go up exponentially. Even if you wind up mutually determining that this is not a good partnership opportunity, at least you will have left a favorable impression, and that will do nothing but help you in the future!

The Bermuda Triangle and partner triangulation

According to Wikipedia "The Bermuda Triangle is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances.


The "Alliance Bermuda Triangle" is typically where partners wind up when attempting "triangulation" - the pursuit of that elusive holy grail resulting from the coming together of 3 companies.


It typically goes like this..... you're working with a partner on an initiative, and he mentions, "hey, we have a partnership with Acme Technologies, we should loop them in to our discussions.  There's typically lots of enthusiasm in the beginning after a series of exploratory discussions...Lots of IGBG - "it's gonna be great" and then..... nothing.


Why? Because getting alignment between two companies is challenging enough. Adding a third to the mix increases the complexity (and risk) by an order of magnitude.


I'm not saying it can't work... I've seen a few. Just know what you're getting into, ask a lot of questions and set expectations all around.

Top 5 Things to Know About Alliances!

Happy New Year to my fellow alliance professionals! After a hiatus and the holiday break, I'm back in the blogger's chair.. 


As we are all in the midst of our 2012 joint business planning efforts with our partners, it's a good time for a few reminders to our alliance stakeholders about what's involved in establishing and developing partnerships. 

To that end, I bring you - The Top 5 Things Stakeholders Should Know About Alliances.

1.       Alliance Relationships Require Care and Feeding

Alliance relationships are much like personal relationships, they require care and feeding to establish and grow. Alliance relationships are made up of a series of personal relationships between executives and stakeholders at both companies. Managing these relationships, developing the shared vision and constructing and executing the joint business plan, is the raison d’etre of the Alliance Manager. All alliances are established based on a promise of mutual value. The role of the Alliance Manager is “value creation” – orchestrating resources, aligning strategic goals, managing conflict to ensure that your company (and the partner) deliver increased value to our customers.

2.       It takes a village

In today’s increasingly complex and interdependent world, it often “takes a village” to deliver a complete solution to the customer. For example, your company may have world class technologies and solutions in multiple industries and horizontal domains. Your partners may bring strong business consulting and domain expertise, scalable delivery capability, complementary technologies and solutions and in many cases, supplementary understanding of your customers’ business issues and environments.

Together with your partner ecosystem, your company is able to extend its capabilities to maximize value to the customer.

3.       Customer demand often drives partnerships

Your customers might express a need for a third party provider’s unique and niche capabilities and may request integration of the third party’s software with yours. Or your Partner’s customer may be making the same request of your partner. Or your company may identify a need to collaborate with a third party to address market demand driven by customer requirements in a certain industry or domain. These are the three major drivers of partnerships.

4.       Alliances help drive innovation!

At SAS, we are collaborating with partners in many of our key technology innovations (e.g. high performance computing) and partners also provide benchmarking/tuning/optimization and new technology adoption support.

In addition to supporting your company's technology innovation, partners also help identify new opportunities, in which we collaborate to deliver joint initiatives. 

5.       Alliance Management is profession! 

Most of the alliance professionals in SAS Global Alliances and Channels division are certified alliance professionals, who have earned their certification through The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP). ASAP is the largest global professional organization dedicated to alliance formation and management. Additionally, SAS is a Global Sponsor of ASAP and we have been encouraging our key partners to become members as well. We leverage ASAP best practices in our work. This helps both our partner community and by extension, our customers, because as a result, we are able to more effectively develop partnerships to create and deliver innovative solutions for our customers.

We've Got the Power!

I recently attended an excellent alliance training class in Boston by Vantage Partners. I'll be commenting in future blog posts about several of my takeaways from the class and my fellow alliance professionals (40 strong) that attended.

My #1 takeaway? ....

We've Got the Power!

We have more power than we realize. Despite the obstacles and challenges inherent in building alliance capabilities in our organizations, despite all the things we feel we have no control over– we do have significant power in our role as “interventionists” in our organizations.

We can hone our skills as alliance professionals and learn the tools and techniques to manage conflict, negotiate based on interests versus positions, identify and manage differences to maximize mutual value of the alliance. The extent to which we build our own skills in these areas is the extent to which we can lead by showing our organizations a better way to think, a better way to make decisions, a more effective framework for managing conflict and thus, a better way to manage and optimize our alliance relationships. 

People follow competence. We can indeed change our organizations – one stakeholder at a time…

Badda bing Badda boom!

Please I beg you - don't be this guy. This is the badda bing, badda boom guy. The guy that starts calling partner prospects "because hey, we need partners!" without a thoughtful strategy.

I know the temptation to do this can be strong, especially if you work at a small company, or if you are under pressure at a larger one. But calling a partner prospect, without understaning why you are calling and why they should care, is a big mistake.

I've been there. While working for a startup, one of the founders came into my office one day and said "we have to partner with XYZ company, we need them!" When I said, "yes, but why do they need us?" he had no ready answer. I suggested we might want to wait until we thought this through before making that first call.

There are three things you must do before making that first call if you want to make a good first impression, and they are not always easy, especially #1.

1. Know your company's product strategy. This can be difficult for small companies, but I've found this to be a challenge at high tech companies of all sizes. With technology,  you can "do anything", so NIH (not invented here) mentality is often a barrier.
2. Know what's in it for the partner. This requires you to understand their business. Walk in their shoes. Understand their market pressures and aspirations. Do your homework!
3. Develop a "partnering proposition". This is critical. Your partnering proposition should articulate what it is you are proposing to do together. Since it's a strawman proposal - a starting point, you may not end up here, but please do not make the prospect figure out what you're asking to do!  Tell them. Simply. And make it as compelling as you can. "Here's what we do, here's what you do, we'd like to collaborate to deliver X and this is how it will benefit you and our mutual customers."

For more on developing a partnering proposition, see this Partnering Proposition Worksheet I developed for use in exploratory partnership discussions.

In the "friend zone"

I was having lunch with an alliance colleague a few months agoand he was diagnosing a problem with one of our alliance relationships. He said the problem we're having is that the partner was "treating us like a partner instead of like a client."

He went on to say, that if we were a client, they would be doing everything they could to understand our organizational structure, our culture, our internal capabilities, etc, in order to build a strategy for success. In other words we were relegated to "the friend zone".

It got me thinking that good alliance managers should use some of the same techniques to understand how to navigate and understand their partner's organization that good sales people use to understand the same about their customers'.

For example, the Global Alliance Manager on one of our key partnerships built an influence map of her partner's organization. For each key partner executive, her team identified their:

• Authority and influence
• Attitude toward our company (positive, neutral, negative)
• Personal style
• Relationships with other influencers

She's found this map very helpful in explaining the partner organization to internal executives and for understanding how to build support for joint initiatives.

There's a great article on influence maps on the Mind Tools website here.

Can't Get No Respect!

I often hear alliance managers complain that our roles are not valued by our organization. That company executives don't appreciate the value of alliances. That "alliances can't get any respect" in the organization.

While a lot of this grousing is somewhat justified - we have made great strides in our profession over the years, but we do have a ways to go - I do find myself challenging my colleagues on the grousing from time to time.

When a fellow alliance colleague comes to me complaining about his organization's ambivalence towards alliances, I ask a few questions:

• Do you have a formal, consistent process for qualifying, developing and executing new partners and new initiatives?
• Do you have a formal approval process for new partner ventures?
• Have all internal stakeholder roles and responsibilities been clearly defined, documented and agreed to?
• Does your Alliances Management team treat the alliance managers on the team like professionals? Is there a formal career path? Are there alliance training/professional development plans in place?
• Is your company a member of ASAP (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals) and do you have certified alliance professionals on staff?
• Are strategic alliance teams staffed with people with the right skills and experience to do the job effectively?
• Is there formal alliance measurement and reporting in place to company executives? 
• Do your partners clearly understand what's expected of them and the partnership in order to drive value for your company?
• Do you have documented joint business plans and quarterly business reviews in place for each of your most strategic partnerships?
• Are alliances managed as a portfolio with periodic inspection on performance? Are poor performing alliances addressed or are alliance relationships like the roach motel - they check in but never check out?!  

I'm not saying that doing these things guarantees that alliances will be respected in your organization - but you will at least have done your part to earn the respect, which is "table stakes" for discussions.

We can't expect our organizations to change, if we aren't willing to do so. Change must start with us!