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
There's a great article on influence maps on the Mind Tools website here.
A great tool and concept. Too often partners nag each other for organization charts which tell less than half the story. The real way decisions get made is in the white space between the boxes and not along the lines.
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