Oil and Water DO mix

Recently I heard a chef being interviewed on the radio discussing his book on cooking myths. He said the biggest cooking myth is adage that oil and water don't mix. According to the chef, oil and water DO mix - when you add an emulsifying agent.

That got me thinking about the role of Alliance Managers. We are great emulsifying agents!

Our job is to keep things that don't normally stick together - like say two account execs from two different companies - together. Left to their own devices, two sales reps from two different companies can be like oil and water - they will not stay together without an emulsifying agent. Enter the alliance manager.

The role of the alliance manager is to keep the radio tuned to every reps favorite radio station - WIIFM or What's In it For Me. We've got to make it clear to both reps what's in it for each of them to collaborate, and we have to build a bridge of trust between the two parties. At SAS we use an Account Introduction Form (AIF) and an Account Engagement Agreement (AEA) to set expectations, build trust and provide a framework for the sales collaboration.

Key "emulsifying" skills for alliance managers are alignment, conflict management and resolution, negotiation, and most of all - strong EQ or emotional intelligence.

Alliance managers employing these skills will keep their alliances "sticking together."

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances, #5 It's Not (just) About Us!

It's Not (just) About Us!

To get what we want in a partnership, we have to have at least passing interest in what our partner wants. This seems like such a simple concept, but it's amazing how many executives lose sight of this. As alliance professionals, if we're advocating for the partner, it's not because we've "gone native", its because we recognize that if we don't work within our organization to ensure that our partner's interests are being met, we will never get the partner to deliver to our interests.

Alliance management is about aligning interests - ours and theirs. We have to be clear about what we want, and we have to be equally as clear about what our partner wants.

I worked with a sales exec many years ago who was fond of saying "bad deals don't last" - meaning that if we use short term leverage to coerce our partners into getting what we want, while completely subordinating their urgent interests, the partner will always find a way out of the deal, I don't care what's in the contract.

So, if this is a partnership we care about - one where they have something to offer that we need (is there any other kind?) - then we must attend to their interests. When we are at the table with our partner, putting our interests on the table and looking for alignment on mutual interests, then and only then, will we have a shot at realizing the potential of the alliance relationship.

So, the next time you are in a meeting with a partner executive, sometimes the best question you can ask them is "What do you want?"

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances, #4 Don't Try This At Home

Don't Try This at Home

In the most recent IBM CEO Study, top performing companies were more than 28% more likely to leverage partnerships for innovation than their under performing counterparts. Top performing firms value collaborative skills and recognize that recruiting and developing people with these skills are critical to their competitive success.

My boss is fond of saying that Alliance management is a profession - not a hobby. Alliance Management requires a specific skill set. Good alliance managers don't grow on trees, they are not a dime a dozen. Good alliance managers have good business savvy, strong conflict management skills, good "EQ"- emotional intelligence, and strong political and organization navigation skills.

You wouldn't put an unskilled sales rep to manage a strategic customer account, so why would you take someone who couldn't cut it in sales and put them on a strategic partnership?

To drive innovation through alliances, bring in the professionals!

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances - #3

Alliances Make the Pie Bigger

There is sometimes a misconception that working with partners is a “zero sum game”  - the more money a partner makes on a deal, the less money your company will make on a deal. In actual fact, more times than not, a partner will help make the size of the pie bigger – “supersize” the deal if you will. How? In a few ways.

1) Scale

At my company, we have several partners that are much larger organizations with thousands of employees and deep presence in Fortune 500 firms. We also have a very large network of smaller partners, who may not have the same reach as the larger partners, but do have deep domain expertise in areas where we need it, and are "boots on the ground" for us in many accounts.  In both instances, partnering with these firms enhances our reach, drives customer satisfaction, and extends our influence.     

2) The vision thing
Many customers have at least one "trusted adviser" consulting organization that they engage at the C level to advise them on vision and strategy. These firms have significant influence with customers and in the IT industry, determine or influence the "stack" (software/hardware solution components) that is ultimately sold to the customer. Partnering with these firms early can put you in the "pole position" in this process and uncover opportunities that you did not even know were there. And turn what for you might have been a departmental sale ($) into a much larger enterprise ($$$) sale. 

3) Access to new markets
Often companies will use partners to establish their presence in new geographic markets. In this case, partners not only increase the size of the pie, they serve up the pie, too!


4) Deal acceleration
Partners can really help provide account intelligence that help you identify potential risks to deal closure. Partners can also help you mitigate those risks to help increase the odds of closure. They can also help validate your solution (through Proof of Concept support for example) and can accelerate your sales cycle, helping you close deals faster. All of these efforts increase your revenues.

Next post - Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know About Alliances -  #4 : Alliances Help Drive Innovation

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know about Alliances - #2

    Alliances are a Team Sport

The alliances organization is a completely dependent organization  – that is to say, we are completely dependent upon the involvement of other organizations to successfully develop and execute alliances. When we make a commitment to a partner, we are making a corporate commitment to that partner on behalf of our company. This means that many organizations at our company (sales, product marketing, product management, professional services, legal, field marketing, external communications, etc.) have a role to play and will be engaged early and often as we establish and develop partnerships.

Therefore, as an executive, in order to ensure high performing alliances, it's not only important that you have strong collaboration skills within your alliances organization, you must also ensure that these skills permeate across the company. You want an "alliance aware" organization - where all the departments that are involved in establishing and developing alliances understand how to collaborate, manage conflict, ensure alignment and drive positive outcomes for BOTH companies.

Alliances are a team sport!

Next post: #3 Alliances Make the Pie Bigger

Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to Know about Alliances - #1

As alliance managers, sometimes our biggest sales job of all is convincing our internal executives of the value of alliances and what it takes to make them successful. Among the key questions we need to answer are:

• What is involved in establishing new partnerships? 
• Why do we need partners? 
• What do alliance managers do anyway? 
• Why do I care?

Do you get these questions from your executives? 


In my next several posts I'll cover the Top 5 Things Your Executives Need to 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 both our company and our partner realize mutual value.

Next post - #2: Alliances are a Team Sport

Managing Differences - Job #1

One of my most important takeaways from Vantage Partner's Alliance University last month was the whole idea that alliances at their core, are about managing differences.

We've all heard people say that alliances are all about "finding the win-win", "looking for the joint value proposition", finding "common ground" and the like. It turns out, that while those things are important, even necessary in forging an alliance relationship, they are not sufficient.

Why?

Well, think about it. According to various studies, alliances have a 50% (or higher depending on the study) failure rate. Presumably, the alliances formed based on identified "common ground" or compelling "joint value proposition", but they didn't last. When I look back at failed partnerships in my 15+ years in alliances, the root cause of the failures was a lack of attention paid to the differences between the two organizations.

Alliance managers sit in between two organizations with different structures, business models, politics, org charts, policies, cultures, philosophies, processes, contracts, etc. etc. The list of differences is usually longer than the list of things we have in common!

When we just focus on the things we have in common, the things our two companies are completely aligned on, and ignore the long list of things where we are not aligned - where we have differences - we are inviting the inevitable conflict. Often that conflict simmers under the surface, but it is always there, like a cancer on the alliance relationship. Left untreated, the patient - our partnership - dies.

Instead, we should proactively, deliberately and intentionally, work with our partner to identify our areas of difference, with particular focus on those areas that are likely to cause conflict. It is a fool's errand to pretend that we can wish away or hope away these differences. A better strategy is to face them head on, and talk openly as a joint team about how we can manage these differences.

Managing differences is job #1 for alliance managers!